DICE 2009: Ensemble Post-Mortem

"I'm a little shocked to be up here doing this." This is the way Bruce Shelley, a 30 year veteran of the gaming industry, opened his post-mortem of Ensemble Studios. The studio has sold over 20 million games and counting, including Age of Empires and Halo Wars, and was closed down by Microsoft in January 2009.

In the tradition of post-mortems, Shelley looked back at what went right and wrong in the studio's history. On the good side, Shelley feels the company had a strong sense of community, good benefits, high morale, and good communication. And last, but not least, they had fun.

On the games side, he spoke about how the company made good choices on which games to develop. The games were different from the competition by bringing new twists on the popular real-time strategy genre with unique themes. All of these games were successful, he noted, thanks to innovative gameplay, polish, and broad appeal. Shelley also noted that having Microsoft as a publisher helped because the company was accepting of delays that meant the final product would be better.

The studio set high bars and kept the entire team involved in the design process. If things weren't working, they were cut. And, Shelley noted that they did, "stop many games over the years that didn't meet our standards internally."

All of this came about from good management and a low turnover rate, he claimed. In fact, only three people left after the announcement came that the studio would close.

"The last thing we did right, I would mention, is Halo Wars."

But what went wrong? Why did the studio close? Amongst the things that could have been done better, Shelley listed that the studio always had a feature list that was too big, never diversified beyond the RTS genre, were in a state of near perpetual crunch, and only managed to create multiple teams at the end of the studio's life. "We didn't adapt well to growing….we lost that sense of unity we had with a team of 40 people or less."

"We spread ourselves too thin going to three projects," Shelley noted, a difficult conundrum when the studio also saw problems from being unable to diversify beyond the RTS genre.

And the ultimate thing that went wrong was that the studio was closed. "We didn't see this coming…maybe we should have downsized when two projects were canceled. Maybe we should have done that."

Shelley closed by saying this is not the end. Bonfire Studios and Robot Entertainment are two startups that have been created by former Ensemble employees. "I believe the things we did right at Ensemble Studios will be carried on by both of these teams." Robot Entertainment has been announced as the studio that will continue on support for Halo Wars post-release and is also working on a new project.

"It's a sad day, but this is business." And that's how the most depressing talk at this year's DICE Summit finished.